In a founding essay on transgender life narratives in contemporary fiction and film, ‘Telling Tales: Brandon Teena, Billy Tipton, and Transgender Biography’, Jack Halberstam demonstrates why this genre of representation has proved so fraught and contested. Examining how the lives of transgender subjects have been ‘dismantled and reassembled through a series of biographical inquiries’, Halberstam proposes that transgender biography can be understood as ‘a sometimes violent, often imprecise project, one which seeks to brutally erase the carefully managed details of the life of a passing person and which recasts the act of passing as deception, dishonesty, and fraud’. The eponymous protagonist of Patricia Duncker's 1999 novel James Miranda Barry was subject to a form of posthumous ‘exposure’ which can be seen as characteristic of the ways in which potentially transgender lives have been depicted in biographical narrative and historical fiction. Historical records indicate that Barry (c. 1799-1865) lived much of his youth and all of his adult life as a man, from his enrolment as a medical student at the University of Edinburgh in 1809, through a notable colonial career as a military surgeon, to his death in London. However, Barry's public memory was irrevocably changed when reports that his body had been discovered on his deathbed to be female were published in the Irish and British press. Barry's life presents a range of narrative possibilities for the historian, biographer or novelist engaged in the project of imagining his experience of his sexed, gendered or sexual identity and its impact on both his personal and his professional identity. However, the narrative most commonly adopted in historical reconstructions of Barry's life is one which depicts him as a woman cross-dressing as a man. This motif is evident in historical biographies including Isobel Rae's The Strange Story of Dr James Barry: Army Surgeon, Inspector-General of Hospitals, Discovered on Death to Be a Woman (1958) and June Rose's The Perfect Gentleman: The Remarkable Life of Dr. James Miranda Barry, the Woman Who Served as an Officer in the British Army from 1813 to 1859 (1977) and in cultural histories such as Julie Wheelwright's Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (1989). These works can be considered revisionary histories which seek to claim Barry for a history of women.